How can I trim leading and trailing white space?

I am having some trouble with leading and trailing white space in a data.frame. For example, I look at a specific row in a data.frame based on a certain condition:

> myDummy[myDummy$country == c("Austria"),c(1,2,3:7,19)] [1] codeHelper country dummyLI dummyLMI dummyUMI [6] dummyHInonOECD dummyHIOECD dummyOECD (or 0-length row.names) 

I was wondering why I didn't get the expected output since the country Austria obviously existed in my data.frame . After looking through my code history and trying to figure out what went wrong I tried:

> myDummy[myDummy$country == c("Austria "),c(1,2,3:7,19)] codeHelper country dummyLI dummyLMI dummyUMI dummyHInonOECD dummyHIOECD 18 AUT Austria 0 0 0 0 1 dummyOECD 18 1 

1. Is there a nice way to 'show' the white space on my screen so that I am aware of the problem?
2. And can I remove the leading and trailing white space in R?

So far I used to write a simple Perl script which removes the whites pace, but it would be nice if I can somehow do it inside R.